Ask the Expert – pedals for acoustic worship guitar

Last week we ran a live online Ask the Expert Q&A session. The main topic was that of guitars, which of course extended to pedals, amps, PA, pick-ups, DI and more besides. We’ll drip out the questions and answers over the coming weeks but if you want to read them all together, please click through to the Facebook event page.

Pedals for acoustic guitars in worship

Bruce West asked a number of of related questions:

“One of the members of our worship team uses an electric guitar pedal for his very nice Taylor guitar. Does an electric guitar pedal really take advantage of all the acoustic sound put out by the Taylor. It wouldn’t seem that would be the best approach.”

There’s your answer. It’s designed to digitally re-model the sound coming in, then shove it through a tube to brighten it up. Very little of the original tone will remain. If that’s the sound he wants, fine, but it will be very different to the tone of an unprocessed Taylor. Wish I could afford a decent Taylor…

Andy Chamberlain, Musicademy:

I’d say Bruce its best to use a pedal that’s specifically designed for acoustic guitar frequencies unless you’re going a ‘low res’ kinda sound for a particular song section or moment. Ive seen acoustic guitarists using all sorts of things – even a RAT distorion pedal but only for specific moments! Fishman do a few pedals to enhance acoustic tone but generally electric will mask the beautiful acoustic tone that you spent all your money on in the first place. If your guitarist feels he needs to buy pedals try a decent DI or volume pedal…

Tim Martin, Musicademy:

I’ve seen a lot of people use the L.R. Baggs Para DI (and a couple use the Venue DI which is a bit more fully featured). They work very well but at the end of the day it comes down to the sound coming out of the guitar. A good Taylor should be a lovely, dynamic sound which you can ‘tune’ a little with a good pre-amp/acoustic pedal but there’s often no need. I nearly always use my acoustic ‘straight in’ and it sounds great. I’ve once used my Pod X3 live when I wanted a specific acoustic effect.

Tim Horton, SFL:

Agree with Tim & Andy… It seems that every church I visit / talk to there is an acoustic guitarist who uses a pedal (usually chorus) to alter the sound.
On behalf of sound engineers the world-over, may I make an impassioned plea; don’t! It can muddy the sound of your beautifully detailed acoustic and just gets messy… Rant over…

Andy Chamberlain, Musicademy:

Isn’t there something in the bible about acoustic guitarists using chorus pedals being thrown into the lake of fire or something?

Bruce West:

What effects (particular pedals) can be tastefully applied to an acoustic/electric guitar (Taylor 614CE) to get the sweetest fingerpicking sound out of it? I hear so many good sounds in recordings that I haven’t been able to reproduce.

Tim Horton, SFL :
A compressor pedal can add a bit of pop & sparkle to a finger picking sound. Will also level out the peaks a bit. Can be useful if you’re switching between strumming and picking in a song.
Careful not to over do it though; you’ll destroy your tone if it’s over comp’d.

It’s also worth remembering that the finger picking stuff works best when there’s space in the mix to use it. If it’s a really upbeat arrangement then a delicate picking pattern will just get drowned out regardless of what you use…

Bruce West:

Should an effects pedal designed for an ELECTRIC guitar, be used on an Acoustic guitar? It doesn’t seem the circuitry would have been designed to take advantage of the nuances of an acoustic.

Tim Martin, Musicademy:

There are some pedals (e.g. a couple of the Line 6 ones) which cater for both to some degree but I’m pretty much of the opinion that we let an acoustic guitar be an acoustic guitar for the most part.

I had a taylor 810ce for a number of years. And while the guitar itself sounded great, I could never get the pickup to sound good with my rig. My includes a fishman aura spectrum DI which blends a mic’ed signal with the guitars pickup. It gives that nice warm mic’ed sound you would get from the studio. In addition to that, I have a delay and a reverb. As a sound engineer as well, I love having that nice rich acoustic tone that comes from a great setup. But I could not get that out of my taylor. So as such I traded that in and got a Martin D-28. And now I have a rich guitar and a warm inviting guitar tone, without a lot of color and extra stuff that doesn’t need to be there.

Tim Nevell

Gosh! I just plug my Martin DRS1 into the DI Box and am gladwhen I have a technitian who can make it sound good from the mixing desk! Last week it was just right, so I went and noted down the settings for future use. I have in the past used a little Zoom FX box for acoustic gutar – and constantly driven the technititans crazy! At the end of the day, a technician with a good ear is worth his weight in gold!

Joe

I usually use a Baggs PADI, and have used a (Eventide) delay pedal on a few other times, but mostly, just aim to get a good tone from the pedal.

I admit I dabbled with drive pedals in the past, but then realised it sounded pretty nasty – my kind buddy who was doing the PA used to turn me down in the mix without me knowing, thus saving the congregation from my misplaced stylings.

Yeah… decent preamp pedal helps if you must, but a lot of acoustic guitars have an onboard preamp these days, so just plug into a DI box. Unless you’ve got a really good PA system, you’re probably not going to hear much difference between a £30 Behringer DI, and a £££ Countryman or BSS once the band kicks in.

Travis

I split the signal coming from my Taylor 614ce – one direct and one into a Line 6 Pod X3 Live, sending both a dry and wet signal to the mixer. The sound team blends them to where it sounds both full and natural in the house, with slight panning towards the side of the stage where I stand. I use different effects from a compressor to phaser to delay to reverb. And the Line 6 clean amp model, I find, adds some unique sparkle that I really like. By itself, the wet signal sounds ridiculous, but mixed right with the dry signal it gets a lot of compliments.

dmq

a takamine with cool tube preamp sounds ultra-sweet going through a bbe “acoustimax sonic maximizer” then into the p.a. i also use a narrow selection of other pedals as well with no noticeable problems and not a single complaint from any tech in any church i’ve played in over the years. btw, once the drums start playing, your acoustic-electric is basically buried in the mix and becomes just another clanging cymbal at best, LOL. altering the sound of the piezo with some kind of pedal is sometimes just what the doctor ordered. i found that the keys to this are to not overdo it, find pedals that are a match for the guitar’s electronics, work with the sound tech to get the right eq, and pray that you are not a distraction as you do your pedal tap dance :D

Jim K.

I am very particular about the sound coming from my Taylor 710 and and constantly looking for ways to make it better.. or at least not make it worse. I agree that overuse of pedals will destroy the beautiful sound that the guitar was built to deliver. The object of the game is to capture that sound and utilize it properly.

I am a firm believer in a good preamp/DI, because whatever happens in that first few stages of amplification is only going to get bigger once it hits the house system. Reasonable compression has helped to even out the sound between fingerstyle and strumming (prevents blasting the audience and saves the sound guy from riding the faders). Haven’t had much success with mic’ing the guitar in a worship band setting due to proximity effect making it sound too “boomy” and ambient noise taking over if the mic gets too far away.

Jim K.

Andy Chamberlain

i think that sums it up well Jim, thanks

Bruce West

Travis, I like the idea of splitting the signal. It sounds simple yet full of possibilities. I too have a 614CE and am always looking for ways to improve the sound.

When you say one line goes direct, do mean into a DI or pre-amp (?)and out to the board while the other goes to the pod and out to the board?

Andy Chamberlain

Hi Bruce

Yes – Go into a DI box with your acoustic and from there split the signal so one output goes to the desk and the other into your POD or whatever you like. Please do experiment and let us know how you get on, However, when you come to use it live with a congregation I would strongly suggest that whatever pod effect you explore try to use it for certain dynamic passages of a song that make a ‘statement’ rather than leaving it on for any time longer than that. Effects on the acoustic can get pretty fatiguing on the ear for the congregation pretty quickly so think of it like cake icing… too much icing can look amazing but make you sick pretty quickly!

Filip E

Can someone give me the exact model name of this taylor guitar?
They are not selling it on their website so don’t know what more to do…
pls help!

Robby

I’m familiarizing myself with learning to play acoustic guitar for small worship settings (i.e. church size of 100+). A lot of the music played is very etherial, ambient, and such similar to Bethel Live (i.e. Come to Me). I’m just curious, besides my FISHMAN TONEDEQ PRE-AMP and MORLEY volume/dynamics pedal, what other pedals would you recommend purchasing to take the worship experience to an etherial, ambient place?